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When I started my
business in my early twenties, I wanted to create a professional
environment that made me feel happy and allowed me to laugh. A
vital part of this included building a team that could put their
faith in me and that I, likewise, could trust. After all, trust
is the foundation of all healthy relationships.

However, I made the mistake of trusting to a fault.

As owner of Molding Box, I was initially required to
micromanage the startup’s various departments — a task that
becomes impossible when rapid growth occurs. In veering away from
directing the whole production, I hired an accountant to come in
and take care of the books. For a year and a half, my accountant
extended her services to my company. And for eight of those
months, she embezzled money to the tune of tens of thousands of
dollars in cash, wreaking havoc on our books.

I suppose I got distracted wearing so many different hats, and I
left the opportunity for too much dishonesty in one person’s
hands. Looking back on it now, I see that the writing was always
on the wall. I joined a long line of people who have made
business mistakes that seem so avoidable after the fact.

It was just that, though: a mistake. It shook my foundation of
trust, but it didn’t bring down the entire structure that I had
built. We just had to go to work, picking up the pieces.

We started an entire department to handle the accounting work and
double-check every detail. We hired an established firm to
initially do auditing and accounting cleanup, and we then
utilized them to hire and train an internal team. I learned to
eliminate “winging it” when it comes to hiring for such an
important position. The firm with accounting degrees/backgrounds
was much better suited to train my team than I was, and it now
runs far more smoothly.

With my new team, we stopped going into things blindly and put
checks and balances in place. For example, all credit card
transactions and daily outflow of money is double-checked. No
longer is a non-stakeholder in the company allowed to make any
financial decision without approval. We now have a saying: “It’s
not that I don’t trust you, it’s that I don’t trust anyone.”

We were burned, simple as that. But when we realized the mistake,
we also realized we could tie something off, move on to the next
step and improve. Strangely enough, the outcome of this whole
mess was a growth in our confidence and ability to move forward.
It proved to us that we may stumble for a second, but we won’t
fall from this kind of experience. We turned the negative into a
positive, knowing that we wouldn’t be burned again.

With so many negatives in business, with so many mistakes to be
made, we know to always find the positives that keep us marching
forward. Our vulnerability was exploited, yet we came out on top;
and from that point on, we’ve only been climbing higher.

Jordan Guernsey is the founder of Molding Box, an innovative company that provides
order distribution, shipping, print services, and CD/DVD
duplication. Jordan started Molding Box in his mother’s basement
and has grown the company into an Inc. 500 list member.

The Young Entrepreneur Council
(YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised
of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership
with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual
mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and
grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library
and email lessons.